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Wayland Can Now Use Gallium3D Software Rendering

Phoronix: Wayland Can Now Use Gallium3D Software Rendering

Besides the obvious requirements and demands of needing to design a display server that can fully replace the needs of the long-standing X Server, and making all the tool-kits and major software support running natively on Wayland, another inhibitor to Wayland's adoption has been its graphics driver requirements. In particular, Wayland requires kernel mode-setting, EGL (in place of a DRI2 requirement), in-kernel memory management (GEM), and 3D acceleration...

Right now this is using the Gallium3D Softpipe driver, but without too many problems it should be possible to get it running with the LLVMpipe software driver. LLVMpipe runs significantly faster than Softpipe as it takes advantage of the Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) and can take full advantage of modern processor features.

The only way to ever run Wayland on the proprietary drivers (assuming the drivers never gain native support for the APIs that Wayland requires) is to run the nested X11 version of Wayland on top of X.org using the binary drivers.

The only way to ever run Wayland on the proprietary drivers (assuming the drivers never gain native support for the APIs that Wayland requires) is to run the nested X11 version of Wayland on top of X.org using the binary drivers.

Or extend Wayland to use the API's present in the binary drivers, which sounds like what is planned. It just doesn't make any sense to try and do that this early in the development process.

Or extend Wayland to use the API's present in the binary drivers, which sounds like what is planned. It just doesn't make any sense to try and do that this early in the development process.

The binary drivers need X running today. Don't think it makes much sense trying to run X just to get the drivers running then run Wayland alongside X rendering through GL, although I guess it's probably possible (and might be a fun science project).

The binary drivers need X running today. Don't think it makes much sense trying to run X just to get the drivers running then run Wayland alongside X rendering through GL, although I guess it's probably possible (and might be a fun science project).

Even if you have hardware acceleration, you can opt to use software acceleration by setting the EGL_SOFTWARE, EGL_DRIVER, and EGL_PLATFORM environmental variables for the Wayland client. This is also capable of running the X11 compositor for Wayland with software rendering.

Please tell me this only influences the specific application.

I don't want to suddenly loose all hardware acceleration for all applications just because one of them wants to go soft.
In other words, don't make an api that basically locks the graphics card down like one of the old windows api functions did.

I don't want to suddenly loose all hardware acceleration for all applications just because one of them wants to go soft.
In other words, don't make an api that basically locks the graphics card down like one of the old windows api functions did.

You probably have to set those variables and then restart Wayland for it to take effect, so you don't have anything to worry about.